Technologies associated with the communication of information have evolved rapidly over the last several decades. Television, cellular telephony, the Internet and optical communication techniques (to name just a few things) combine to inundate consumers with available information and entertainment options. Taking television as an example, the last three decades have seen the introduction of cable television service, satellite television service, pay-per-view movies and video-on-demand. Whereas television viewers of the 1960s could typically receive perhaps four or five over-the-air TV channels on their television sets, today's TV watchers have the opportunity to select from hundreds, thousands, and potentially millions of channels of shows and information. Video-on-demand technology, currently used primarily in hotels and the like, provides the potential for in-home entertainment selection from among thousands of movie titles.
The technological ability to provide so much information and content to end users provides both opportunities and challenges to system designers and service providers. One challenge is that while end users typically prefer having more choices rather than fewer, this preference is counterweighted by their desire that the selection process be both fast and simple. Unfortunately, the development of the systems and interfaces by which end users access media items has resulted in selection processes which are neither fast nor simple. Consider again the example of television programs. When television was in its infancy, determining which program to watch was a relatively simple process primarily due to the small number of choices. One would consult a printed guide which was formatted, for example, as series of columns and rows which showed the correspondence between (1) nearby television channels, (2) programs being transmitted on those channels and (3) date and time. The television was tuned to the desired channel by adjusting a tuner knob and the viewer watched the selected program. Later, remote control devices were introduced that permitted viewers to tune the television from a distance. This addition to the user-television interface created the phenomenon known as “channel surfing” whereby a viewer could rapidly view short segments being broadcast on a number of channels to quickly learn what programs were available at any given time.
As these technologies advance, more equipment has become available for viewing media content. For example, media content, e.g., television shows, movies and advertisements, can now be viewed on various display devices which can receive their inputs from different sources. Movies can be viewed on a television with the input being a high definition multimedia interface (HDMI) signal received from a cable box (or other source) via a high definition (HD) cable. Alternatively, movies can, in some cases, be viewed on a monitor attached to a personal computer (PC) with the signal received by the monitor being a digital visual interface (DVI) signal. Both the HDMI signal and the DVI signal can carry color data in either red green blue (RGB) format or the YCbCr format, however there is currently no simple, flexible way to integrate multiple HDMI and DVI signals and to also have flexible control over the output.
RGB is an easily understood and widely used color space for computers. RGB represents color as an additive combination of red, green, and blue. For example, an RGB signal having equal parts of these inputs generates a grayscale value, an RGB signal having equal parts red and green generates a yellow value while an RGB signal having equal parts green and blue generates a cyan value, and an RGB signal containing equal parts blue and red results in a magenta value. YCbCr is widely used in video formats and compression algorithms. It is a way of encoding RGB data. The YCbCr format was designed to facilitate color TV at a time when TV program was black & white. The Y component is the luminance (or how bright the image is), Cb and Cr are chrominance components.
Content which is displayed on televisions is, today, highly controlled by the content distributor, e.g., cable television providers, satellite television providers and the like. Accordingly, it would be desirable to merge in other video feeds to increase the flexibility of content viewed by end users.